Feature Request: Highlight Effect

[sjefen]

A new idea from me again

Instead of using the reflection on for example the leafs on trees we could have a "highlight" or "glossyness" option in the shaders. This is something that will only make the parts where the sun is supposed to be reflected, brighter with a chosen color. It would be a lot faster I guess and on a population of trees we would probably not see any difference.

Regards,
Terje

[Cyber-Angel]

The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight. 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

[Tangled-Universe]

The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight. 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

Exactly, I thought that too.
You can choose the reflective color, so that should be no problem.

Martin

[sjefen]

The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight. 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

Alright.... specular highlight it is

The term your looking for is specular as in  specular highlight. 

Regards to you.

Cyber-Angel 

Exactly, I thought that too.
You can choose the reflective color, so that should be no problem.

Martin

Are you talking about using the "reflective shader" or something else?

Regards,
Terje

[Tangled-Universe]

Reflective shader and default shader have a setting called "reflection tint", this is where you can choose your color.

[sjefen]

Yes, but this still is reflections and that makes it slow.
I want an option for only specular highlight. Much faster

Regards,
Terje

[Tangled-Universe]

Yes, but this still is reflections and that makes it slow.
I want an option for only specular highlight. Much faster

Regards,
Terje

This IS about specular highlights.

In the specular tab (hence, the name?) of the default shader you find functions which mention reflectivity but they ARE specular highlights.

In the reflection shader (again, the name) you can create real reflections (raytraced). However, if you disable the raytracing of these reflections you will end up with the exact same function as in the default shader.

[sjefen]

So if I turn off "Ray traced reflections" it will become exactly what I'm asking for??

[Matt]

If you disable ray traced reflections in the Reflective Shader, you get specular highlights which take very little time to compute. Even so, it still "cheats" overall reflectivity of the rest of the environment by using a fast lookup of the environment stored in the GI cache, so you can't render just highlights without any other reflectivity, but to be frank I woudn't like to let you do that anyway Disabling ray traced reflections gives you fast specular highlights and a fast approximation to the general ambiance of other reflections, depending on the GI settings.

The reflective (specular) settings in the Default Shader do the same thing as the Reflective Shader with ray traced reflections disabled.

Matt

[Tangled-Universe]

That's what I meant to say/explain.
As usual Matt puts it in better words than me

[sjefen]

The reflective (specular) settings in the Default Shader do the same thing as the Reflective Shader with ray traced reflections disabled.

Alright Matt. I looked, but did not find it in the Default shader

Well..... no need for my request after all . I did not now this was the case. Thanks for the info guys.

Regards,
Terje